


Jumper

by DailyDaves



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Time Travel, Universe Travel, timeline Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 15:39:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3176910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DailyDaves/pseuds/DailyDaves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A universe jumper meets a wanderer. </p>
<p>(Michael Jones finally belonged, and Gavin Free did, too. They’d found a home in the same reality together, years after they’d parted, the two of them stuck in the same universe with each other.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jumper

**Author's Note:**

> A little something I did to get back into writing. Feedback appreciated!

It started when he was twelve.

When Michael Jones had been young, he’d liked puzzles. It was uncharacteristic of him—after all, who in the hell would think the cussing, stomping, loud-mouthed kid would like to sit quietly and fit tiny fucking pieces of cardboard together to make a goddamn picture?

Nobody. That’s who. Nobody would think that because Michael normally couldn’t shut his mouth for two seconds, let alone sit and do a puzzle. It certainly wasn’t possible, but even from an early age, Michael showed everyone that he couldn’t give two shits about what they thought of him.

He’d loved them ever since he was young. It was one of the ways to get him to calm down. The den was crowded with puzzles and Michael refused to even let anyone come near them with glue. No way were they going to glue his masterpiece. He’d tear them apart and then do them again and again until the coloring on the pieces rubbed off on his fingers. Which was how multiple puzzles had been ruined.

Maybe he’d always known that something was different about him. He was like the other kids, just a little more emotional. He had no problem showing emotion, and though people described him as an explosively angry boy, he wasn’t. He just refused to push his anger down and hide it and because he didn’t and expressed it in its full potential, it went away. He’d get furious and then he’d be able to be calm again. However intense his emotions were, he knew they would pass if he let them flow freely. So that’s what he always did.

Emotion was colorful to him. He’d always known that he experienced things a little differently. In the heights of his emotions, whether happy, excited, sad, or angry, the strings that held his reality together would start to tear and ebb and time would seem to slip away from his grasp. He knew that other kids didn’t see this, that their emotions would be more subtle and passive, but he didn’t mind. He enjoyed the wild heights of his emotions, especially since they made things more interesting, more vivid.

He’d been like that all his life. But he only starting jumping when he was twelve.

 

Divorce.

Michael wanted to scream. He wanted to shatter the windows, to punch the walls, to yell and scream and fight until there were no more words left to say. He wanted to bang his fists against the ground and throw temper tantrums and act like a little kid again. But he couldn’t. His baby brother was asleep, his parents were getting a divorce, and Michael wanted none of it to happen.

The only thing he could do was throw himself onto his bed, releasing a scream into the pillow, high-pitched and full of tears. His voice was muffle, so it wasn’t loud enough to wake his brother, and the punches he threw were all softened by the mattress. He kicked and screamed and punched, remembering the D-word rolling off his mother’s lips as she tried to calmly explain to him what was happening.

Divorce. They were getting divorced. His perfect little family was going to shambles.

She’d promised—She promised they would be family forever! She was happy! She had to be! What was so wrong? She’d promised him and in just a few moments, all of those promises had gone to shit and Michael felt like he’d never been so angry in his life.

She’d _lied to him._ She was the one who was always telling him not to lie. Now she was a hypocrite, doing exactly what she told him not to and trying to make the divorce look like a good thing. She couldn’t sugar-coat this. She’d lied and there was no way she could hide that now, and no way that Michael would let her just brush it off.

Things were falling apart around him, Michael clenching his eyes shut, balling his sheets in his fists, tears streaming down his face and into his pillow. Everything around him felt distant, even the sheets in his hands. They were far, far away, the bed below him fading away.

His head was spinning, whirling about, making him dizzy. He stopped noticing the surrounding room, and time came jumbled to him. How long had he been lying here? How long had he been away? How did he go back?

A part of him was aware that the seams that held the universe together were fading into his sea of rage, the red furious waters dulling until they were grey with confusion and Michael was paddling through, trying to stay afloat. There was no more bed under him. There were no sheets in his hands. He was floating, alone on a continent of grey waters, the cold soaking through him until he was forced to come back into himself.

He opened his eyes slowly, and what came into view wasn’t his bedroom. It wasn’t even his house.

He was in a room with a fire place, his mother and father sat on the couch, both of their eyes on the television. They couldn’t be the same people, though. His mother was younger, her red hair longer, her face less stressed. His father had no grey hair, no bald patches, and he was relaxed, his arm around Michael’s mother. They looked so different, and Michael could hardly recognize them with their younger faces and carefree attitudes. Besides them, nothing was the same.

The house wasn’t his house. Michael could see snow falling outside—this was some _where_ else, too. He lived in Austin. It didn’t snow in Austin. These people couldn’t be his parents, this wasn’t his house, this didn’t even feel like his _time_. Something felt incredibly off. These people—his parents?—didn’t even seem to see him there. They acted completely oblivious to him, as if he were invisible.

—And worst of all, they never noticed the boy with the sandy hair and dark eyes in the shadows of the corner by the window, either. But Michael did. And it made him scared enough to jump again, this time landing right back in his own timeline, reality sliding back into the right places again, leaving Michael with his sheets balled up in his hands and an image of the boy about his age, standing in the corner with wide, dark eyes.

 

It happened more and more as time went on. Michael’s parents ended up getting divorced, but Michael didn’t allow himself to become so upset about it again. That first jump had been a bad one for him and he wasn’t itching to repeat that experience. He didn’t fully understand what had happened—it just felt like a vivid dream, like he’d cried himself into an angry sleep and his mind had created a world where his parents were still happy together. A dream. That’s all.

So it didn’t happen for a while. Somewhere in his mind, Michael made the effort, either consciously or unconsciously, to not get so upset about things. He was somewhat aware that the intensity of emotions was what caused it, even if he didn’t have a name for It yet.

He was fourteen when it happened again.

His team was winning. Thank fuck. The goddamned football team of the high school hadn’t won a fucking game in two years. Not one game. They were infamous for their sucky sports teams, whether it was football or anything else that required teamwork. But finally—finally, in Michael’s freshman year—they were winning a game. It was a good omen. The school year had just begun and this was the first game of the season. Things were going to be good from here on out—he could feel it.

It was a new start in a new school and holy _fuck_ his team just scored another goal with ten seconds to spare, and they were already ahead. If they could just—just keep the ball, they would win! They would win their first game in two years and get the year off to a roaring start.

Michael was bundled up for the chill, grinning ear to ear, his cheeks bright red from the cold wind, as well as from the excitement, and his mind was happily buzzing away with the rest of the crowd. He could feel the heartbeat of the excitement, pulsing in time with the cheers from the stands. Michael was swept up in its warm arms and carried along with everyone else. He was part of a greater collective, yelling and jeering and singing the chants, a voice in a crowd with overflowing joy.

He didn’t immediately notice, this time, when things started to fall away. It wasn’t like before, either, where Michael was so angry that it’d torn the thread of his reality. This was different. It was a different kind of emotion, warm with joy instead of hot with rage.

He didn’t notice when the crowd around him started fading out, never taking note until they sounded far, far away, as if he were underwater, listening to the sounds of above the shore. Everything was muffled, and the sound was disconnected from his visual. The field before him started fading to white, blinding him just as his heart began beating to its own pace, separate from the heartbeat of the crowd and no longer in sync with it.

Bright—the light was so goddamn bright. It felt like it was burning Michael’s eyes out of his head, making him squint, the crowd behind him fading into one long hum. The cheers were no longer distinguishable, the jeering at the other team gone, all of it becoming a murmur in the background. He closed his eyes, trying to shut the blinding light out, his eyelids burning from its brightness.

It was happening again. His emotions had been too intense. He didn’t want to open his eyes. He didn’t want to be somewhere else. It was happening again, and he knew exactly what was going on, but opening his eyes meant he had to face it, to accept that what happened two years wasn’t just a dream, but an actual reality that happened.

But he had to open them.

There was no way to get out of this unless he opened his eyes.

His thoughts were met with a cold wind to his face, forcing him to bite back chills as he tried to slowly open his eyes. Every bone in his body shook with the cold and even though he found himself standing on the same bleachers he’d left, he knew he was elsewhere.

There were three things Michael could say he knew for certain in that moment—

One. He was not in the same place he’d been before. These were the same bleachers, but they were covered with ivy and moss, half of them buried under mounds of dirt. Hardly any metal stuck out from them. The football field was the same one he’d just watched his team play at, now overgrown with weeds and tall grass, the goalposts as mossy as the bleachers were. This was once the place he’d been, but not anymore.

Two. He’d jumped. It was as simple as that, and that was the first word to come to Michael’s mind. Jump. Because he’d jumped time. No, no, that couldn’t be right. This wasn’t another _time_. It was another _place_. Not a location. A different place on a different timeline. A different reality.

Three. He wasn’t alone. The bleachers were empty, save for two places—one where Michael himself stood, and at the top, where a gangly teenager with hair down to his shoulders sat. He was alone except for that. The crowd had disappeared. No one played on the field. No one was outside, wandering. It was just the two of them, an overgrown field, and the grey, ashy skies.

Michael could still almost hear the crowd roaring behind him as he took that first step, the sound of his foot hitting the exposed metal of the bleachers resounding through the area. He watched his ‘companion’ closely, and saw that he hadn’t moved an inch, not even to look for the source of the sound. So he took another step.

The air breathed coldness around them, pushing its fingers into Michael’s lungs, making him tremble even more. This was pointless—absolutely pointless. He had no reason to approach the other boy. None at all. He’d be back soon enough, just like last time. Back to fucking reality. Not this—dream-like one.

The idea of being in an entire other reality didn’t faze him. It didn’t even surprise him. He’d never been normal—and this had happened once before. It was no longer just his intense emotions that set him apart from other kids. It was this, the fact that when his emotions reached their extreme height, Michael would essentially become unstuck from reality.

“Hey.”

He’d approached the boy. He seemed about Michael’s age, with a soft face and a big nose. His sandy hair reached down to his shoulders, falling over his face as he stared down at the book he was reading. Michael frowned, glaring at him, unhappy that he hadn’t even cared to look up, let alone answer.

“Hey! You!” He shouted it, standing right in front of the boy now.

Slowly, he looked up, bangs falling all over his features, dark green eyes peeking from under his hair, eyes that Michael remembered as clear as day. He’d seen those dark eyes before, when they were on a shadowed face. He’d never forget the wide-eyed boy he’d seen when he first jumped.

“Piss off.”

Michael didn’t know what he’d expected, but it hadn’t been that. The kid’s mouth was set in a thin scowl, his voice heavily accented, his dark eyes glaring at Michael. He’d given off the look of some shy, soft-spoken boy, not one who boldly told him to get away. He narrowed his eyes at Michael, clearly irritated that he’d interrupted him, his face going from nonthreatening to intimidating in a matter of seconds.

Michael returned the expression, eyebrows furrowing together, his nose scrunching up in a show of disgust and anger. Who the hell did this kid think he was? Him with his stupid English accent and his shitty attitude.

“Hey, it’s not like I’m here by choice or anything!” He spat back, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket. He hadn’t meant to come here. He’d forgotten to keep his emotions in check and had fallen from reality again. It wasn’t his fucking fault.

“Bloody Jumpers,” The kid gave him one last glare before hunching over again, going back to his book.

Michael honestly felt like kicking him, “What did you just call me?!” He shot it back angrily, hissing the words through his teeth. Michael might’ve been rude, but this kid was fucking intolerable. It wasn’t just the few words he’d said to him—it was his whole attitude. He seemed to reflect the greyness of their surroundings. The desolate word was mirrored in his bored, agitated face. He was clearly unhappy with Michael still being in his face, as evidenced by the way his huge nose was pushed upwards in irritation.

“A. Jumper.” He didn’t even look up from his book. “You don’t belong here. None of your kind does. Get out of my face and go away.”

That was _it_. That was fucking it. Michael Jones, notorious in school for fighting, with his raging emotions and short fuse, was _pissed_. All he wanted was a goddamned explanation, and all this kid gave him were unwarranted insults. He’d started this whole thing, being outright rude to Michael, who’d just wanted to get his attention and some answers. People like this were Michael’s worst nightmare. People like him—insolent and narcissistic, thinking they were better than everyone else. _‘Get out of my face’_ God, this kid needed to be taught a fucking lesson. He was worse than the kids at school who provoked him.

So Michael did the one thing he knew, the one reaction he could resort to, and he pulled his fist back, just as the boy looked up and locked eyes with him, giving him a look that said every word he didn’t speak, ‘ _Try me’_.

He swung. _Hard_. His fist immediately connected with something hard and for a moment, he was overjoyed—this kid would know not to mess with him again—

“ _Ow!_ Michael, holy shit! Don’t get so excited!”

Without any bright lights or confusion, he was back. Back in the bleachers of the football game, shivering in the cold, people around him cheering and screaming their team’s name. Ray stood beside him, rubbing his arm, where Michael had hit. Cold nipped at Michael’s freckled cheeks, his smile slowly falling from his face. He was back. Somehow he’d sewn reality back together. An intense emotion had forced it to slip from his grasp, and an intense emotion had brought him back.

As confusing as it was, it wasn’t rocket science.

He didn’t have to understand it. He knew what caused it and what it was. It didn’t matter why it happened or the reasoning behind it. It simply _was_ , and once he started jumping, there was no way to stop.

 

Fifteen.

He was fifteen years old. His name was Michael Jones. And this was not his reality.

He didn’t know who’s reality this was. He barely remembered how he’d jumped—Something to do with sadness. It was one of _those_ jumps, the ones where Michael struggled to remain on top of it. He was fifteen years old, his name was Michael Jones, and this was not his reality.

One, two, three, four—

He measured his breath in seconds. Four seconds in, four seconds held, four seconds out. It was alright. Even if he didn’t remember why he’d jumped, he still knew who he was and the fact that he didn’t belong here. That was enough for him, though he’d wanted more. For right now, it was enough.

The room was dark around him and it honestly smelled _terrible_. He was sitting on a stiff, springy bed, covered in hard sheets and smelly blankets. Across from him was a small television, a front door, and the door to a bathroom. The drapes were pulled, the only light streaming in from the cracks of sunlight filtering through the blinds, making lines on the walls and bed. Ugly wallpaper covered the walls and uncomfortable carpet the floors.

There was no doubt about it. He was in some sleazy motel room. This place took every motel or hotel room Michael had been in and extracted the bad parts of it, making the epitome of a shitty motel room. It was bare minimum, and Michael knew he’d never been here, though it did seem slightly familiar.

With the onset of puberty, Michael had been jumping much more. Usually, he was alone when he arrived. The other boy was only present sometimes, and Michael had given up trying to speak to him, since he was always dry and dismissive. He wasn’t all that strange, either—Michael saw certain people in multiple jumps. They never retained memories from jump to jump, though.

He sometimes struggled to retain his own memories. Usually, it was in cases like this, when it’d been a negative emotion that had forced the unraveling of his space. Happy emotions meant more awareness. Negative ones meant less. It was simple enough.

Michael also began to make more sense of things, too. He wasn’t jumping time—he was jumping time _lines_. There was his reality, and then there were a million more. Every decision he’d ever made, or anyone had ever made, there was another reality where that decision hadn’t been made, and yet another where the opposite decision had been made. His raging emotions caused the strings that held him in his reality to unknot and he’d be thrown into another, where he was still Michael, though a different Michael.

Sometimes, he did have vague memories of that other Michael, which he was thankful for, since it gave some context to the jump. There was nothing he fucking _hated_ more than being tossed into a different reality where everything was different, without any knowledge of what was going on before he’d arrived. And this was one of _those_ times.

He was older. He could tell that much. Even glancing at the mirror near the bathroom told him that. His hair was a bit more grown out, his face matured more. He was older, but not by much. And he was alone. In a shitty motel room. With no clue why he was here.

He’d fucking hit the jackpot of all bad jumps.

It’d be over soon enough, though. It always was. This reality would eventually give way to his and everything would be in the right place again. Eventually. Meaning he just had to stick it out.

And with that thought came a knock on the door.

_God fucking dammit._

If there was one thing Michael Jones hated, it was interacting with other people when he jumped. It was something he didn’t think he should mess with, and he’d played more than enough video games and read more than enough books to know that messing with timelines was _not_ a good idea. So he just stayed away from others as much as he could, not wanting to mess with his other self’s future.

But then again, there was always an exception. That exception was when he was forced to speak with another person. Times like these. Times where Michael knew that in order to get back to his reality, he’d have to do what instinct told him to—and now, that was to get off his ass and open the door.

The scratchy carpet felt even worse than it looked beneath his feet and it took him a few moments more than he would’ve liked to figure the locks out. After a lot of frustration, he was finally able to turn the knob and pull the door open, leaving him shivering in the cold morning, looking into the face of a person he’d seen so many times before.

He couldn’t even get a single word out—The kid standing opposite him said the exact thing that was on Michael’s mind, “—Not you again!”

Standing in front of him, skinny and gangly and just as rude as he always was, was the strange, insolent bastard that had appeared in many of his jumps. Michael had stopped engaging him after getting jack shit out of him, concluding that he was just one of those people he saw from jump to jump. He assumed the boy to just be quiet and shitty in every reality Michael jumped to, and that it was simply a constant that he didn’t like whatever version of Michael was in that particular universe. It made sense—there were a lot of constants like that.

“Pleased to fucking meet you, too,” He hissed back, preparing to step back and chain lock the door shut.

He expected the blonde boy to turn and get out of his face, distancing himself as far away from Michael as possible, just like he usually did. But he didn’t. He stayed right where he was, his eyebrows furrowing together, his mouth drawn upwards in a scowl, his hands balled into fists at his side. He was the poster child of rage, an emotion that had made Michael jump far more than any other. This weak-ass bastard, with his long hair and huge nose, was fucking _pissed_ at him.

“God, I am so bloody _tired_ of you!” He yelled, his voice cracking at its high pitch, his accent even heavier than it was before. Emotion made him far _less_ understandable, and somehow, Michael found it funny—this weird British kid screaming at him outside of a motel. It was clearly early morning, the sky flooded with the bright colors of a recent dawn, the cars rushing past on the highway beyond the motel’s parking lot few and far in-between. Whoever this Michael was, whatever his reasoning was for being here, was going to really get it when this Michael went back to his reality. This damn kid had to be waking up everyone within a mile radius of the place.

“You and your—” He went on, stumbling his way through sentences, barely making full-fledged words. He honestly sounded a bit like a squawking bird. “—Your jumps—You and your shit constant—Can’t you just stay out of my bloody timelines?! I’ve never met such an insolent, careless jumper like you!”

Wait, that didn’t make sense.

That didn’t make any fucking sense at all.

This kid was supposed to be like everyone else—completely unaware of Michael’s jumping. He’d never told anyone about what happened when he felt emotions so violently. It was like talking to people during his jumps: he thought it would’ve broken the unspoken rules of the universe. But this kid knew. He knew and that meant the one other time he’d spoken with Michael hadn’t been the fluke he’d always thought it was. No, this kid knew about his jumping. He knew about every other time they’d seen each other, and he’d retained his memories of seeing Michael during jumps and obviously knew that he didn’t belong.

That had to be wrong. It didn’t sit right with him in the least. While Michael had always known he was different, he never really thought it was odd that he could jump into other realities. It was just a fact of life. His instinct told him it was alright and it didn’t usually fail him. He trusted it, and he especially did when it told him that something was off about this whole situation.

“I’m sorry—who are you?” He couldn’t keep the irritation out of his voice, but he did hide his confusion. He crossed his arms, narrowing his eyes into a glare, his mind split between anger and panic. Anger at this kid for—really, being a fucking asshole—and panic about what was happening, stemming from his lack of understanding.

And his tone just seemed to piss this kid off more, because his next words came with a shove, pushing him onto his ass on the smelly floor of the motel room, sending Michael spinning back to his own reality, colors meshing together until his vision faded back to the dark walls of his own room, his ears ringing with the last words he’d heard the kid say.

“Gavin Free.”

 

 

He was back on the overgrown bleachers.

It wasn’t strange—he’d jumped to the same reality multiple times. He didn’t have any control as to where he went.

Today it was here. The last time he’d jumped was when the kid—Gavin—had shoved him down. This was less than a week afterwards. He was jumping around more than he liked to, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He was a teenager. That was the bottom line—his reactions and emotions were hard to keep in check, and Michael had stopped fighting it by now. It wasn’t always an inconvenience, either. Sometimes it was actually interesting.

And sometimes he needed to get away. Unlike last time, Michael knew why he’d jumped and what emotion had set it off.

Anger and grief. Maybe. Michael wasn’t quite sure if it was _really_ grief since he hadn’t lost anyone. Maybe it was more like guilt, though he did feel as if he’d lost his mother and the rest of his family.

He’d always thought his family was different, that they wouldn’t be like the people he heard about on the news. All good things came to an end, though, the day Michael decided to come out to his family. Today was the day he’d planned for weeks and weeks, the day he thought his family would be happy for him, and the day that they had insulted him and made sure he felt like the disappointment he was. He was glad he’d jumped. He didn’t want to go back and face that. At least not now.

Which was why he was lying on his back in the grass and moss covered bleachers, looking up at the cloudy sky. There was never any people in this reality, with the exception of the first time he’d come here. It was quiet, deserted, and Michael wanted to fall asleep here and never wake up to his own reality.

He was drifting off, his eyes slowly closing, arms wrapped around himself to keep his body heat in, when he heard the footsteps. They were far off at first, climbing the bleachers, rubber soles connecting with the hidden metal of the bleachers. Michael didn’t even have to sit up; he knew who it was without looking and as the footsteps grew closer and closer, Michael only got surer sand surer.

“Hey,” The footsteps came to a rest and Michael opened his eyes to the accented voice, seeing the face of the boy who’d screamed at him and shoved him come into focus. He’d cut his hair, his blonde hair short and somehow looking even stupider than it had before. His voice for once didn’t hold any anger, nor was his face scrunched up in rage.

Michael returned the absence of rage, instead stuttering out a bewildered, “Hey.”

The bleachers creaked and groaned as Gavin sat himself down at his feet, hunching over and looking from Michael to the ground and back again. Silence fell between them and it was louder than any words, but Michael had none to speak. He waited and waited until finally, Gavin locked his eyes on the ground and murmured something Michael could barely hear, “—Sorry about last time.”

He sounded like he didn’t mean it, and Michael _knew_ it, but that wasn’t something that mattered. He’d said the apology begrudgingly, as if he was a toddler and his parent was instructing him to apologize, but Michael didn’t particularly cared. He was talking. That was what mattered. He wanted to talk to someone, someone who wasn’t his family, who wasn’t already judging him.

“Whatever; it’s fine,” Michael pushed himself up into a sitting position, swinging his legs over the edge of the bleacher so he was sat next to Gavin. “I’m Michael.”

Gavin turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow, “I know. I’m Gavin.”

“You told me that last time.”

“Wasn’t sure if you heard me.”

“I did,” Michael huffed. “Where the hell are you from, anyways? England? You’ve got one of those cockeyed accents.”

“ _What_?!” Gavin scoffed, throwing Michael a glare. “My accent is _not_ cockeyed!” Of all things, _that_ had been the thing to offend him. This kid really was weird. But maybe it was a different kind of weird. The kind of weird that Michael didn’t find annoying. There was a chance that he didn’t think Gavin was irritating because of the fact that he wanted someone to talk to. That was a very real possibility—just not one Michael wanted to think about.

There was a huge elephant in the room, too, and Michael hated beating around the bush. He’d always been a blunt person, and that didn’t change even if he was upset, “What are you? Are you real?”

Gavin looked away from him, instead looking up at the sky, humming in thought before answering, “Hm. I think so? I mean, probably? I sorta… Wander. I’m not really sure where I belong. I stumble into a lot of other people’s minds. Only jumpers, though. I can’t stumblr into anyone else’s. I don’t jump, not like you. I wander. I sorta… enter someone’s mind.”

“You make no sense,” Even though he did. To an extent.

“Hey!” Gavin squawked back at him. “You just don’t understand!”

“Like hell I don’t understand!” Michael honestly tried to keep himself from laughing, but the imagery of Gavin squawking like a bird was too much for him. “It’s not my fault that you’re talking in circles!”

And as strange as it was, Michael found his first real friend that day.

 

Sixteen.

“Your mom’s a mean bird, Michael.”

“Eh,” Michael shrugged nonchalantly. “I guesso.”

“No, she _is_ ,” Gavin whined back at him. “She’s _awful_ , Michael.”

“God, if you’re going to say my name, at least say it _right_.”

Things were bad at home. Michael’s family was as judging as ever. He jumped every day now, finding solace in his time with Gavin.

 

Sixteen and a half.

“How come _you_ never talk about your fucking life?”

He was a little frustrated, though not at Gavin. At everything else. All Gavin did was his usual half-shrug, “Don’t have much to talk about. I told you, Michael. I don’t really know where I belong. I don’t think I have a home reality like you do.”

“What’s with the stupid accent, then? You had to have parents that taught you to speak.”

“Yeah, but I don’t really think I belong there.”

“Where’s ‘there’?”

Gavin paused, looking off into the distance again. They were in a city now. Michael had jumped to the rooftop, and Gavin had found him almost immediately. They were both leaning on the railing of the office building’s sunspot, looking into the city below, “Oxford. My parents life there. I guess I do, too. Things are hard there. I don’t belong. I never have.”

Michael raised an eyebrow, “So what? You just upped and disappeared?”

Gavin grinned at him and nodded, “I’m not like you, Michael. When I go into a different timeline, I don’t leave a body behind. I don’t come back to the next second in time. I leave completely. I guess I am a bit like you, but I can control it. You can’t.”

“Typical Gavin,” Michael shot him a fake-glare. “Ever told anyone where you go?”

“Nope. Except for you, of course.”

“Of course,” Michael copied his accent, laughing to himself.

 

Seventeen.

“Did you play the new Halo, Michael?”

“Is that really a question you’re asking me?”

If there was one thing Gavin liked to talk about, it was video games. Gavin absolutely loved video games and once he’d found out Michael also liked video games, he was even more all over Michael than before. Gavin had taken a lot of warming up to, but once they’d hit it off, Gavin was the loveable, idiot bastard that he was.

“You _did_! Oh, Michael, how was it? I want to play it soon, too! How’s the multiplayer? What kind of weapons did they add? Who’s your favorite character? Tell me everything, Michael, everything!”

“Jesus shit, dude, just play it for yourself. I’m not spoiling _shit_ for you.”

“Oh, you’re so mean!”

 

Seventeen and three months.

“How are things at home for you?”

Two months ago, Michael had convinced Gavin to attempt to return to his reality with his parents. He had and while they had set times to meet every day, Gavin seemed to be a bit down, though more grounded. Michael didn’t know _where_ Gavin’s reality was, but he was happy that the idiot had finally gone home instead of wandering through different timelines.

“Alright,” Gavin answered, running his fingers through the sand of the beach they were on. “I finally got the new Halo game. There’s this guy at school who plays, too. Dan. I think I’ve told you about him before.”

“Yeah, yeah,” He was even happier to hear that Gavin was actually interacting with people, too. He seemed more stable overall. Which was what Michael had wanted. It was still hard to believe that he was here with this guy, who wandered through people’s minds, who had screamed at him and gotten so pissed at him, who was now his friend, who Michael now talked to and saw every day.

Things were better at his home, too. He was learning to ignore his mother more. He had a job lined up for after high school—an electrician. It wasn’t great, but it paid okay.— and knowing Gavin had helped him work through a lot. His mood wasn’t all over the place anymore, nor was he having violent mood swings. He was doing better, and so was Gavin.

 

Seventeen and a half.

He’d fallen in love.

He’d fallen in love and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

He’d fallen in love with the wandering kid who he shared everything with, the kid who wasn’t even part of his reality, who didn’t even exist in his world.

It was one thing to fall in love with someone he’d never be with. That would be fine. He would totally be just fine with falling for a celebrity or an idol. No, this was different. Gavin wasn’t even anywhere on his plane of existence. He was permanently unstuck. His home reality was different from Michael’s. He only existed in Michael’s jumps. Not anywhere else.

He wasn’t real and Michael had fallen in love with him and it was the most devastating thing he’d ever done.

 

 

“Michael! Michael, where have you been?” Gavin was jumping at him, hugging him around the waist, just short of picking him up and spinning him around like a child. Gavin was waiting for him, just like he always was, just like he had always been for two years. His best friend, the one he shared everything with, the one constant in all of his jumps.

Michael hadn’t seen him for a week. It wasn’t by choice. He was having trouble jumping. It’d begun to get harder and harder to elicit strong, intense emotions. Lately, he’d just been thinking about his feelings for Gavin—his strong emotions towards him—and it would let him jump. Even that hadn’t been enough, though. He’d honestly _tried_ for the past week, but it was hard, and the only thing that had pushed reality into letting him jump had been his frustration.

Puberty was calming down. His emotions weren’t as wild anymore. He was jumping less and less. He’d grown so used to jumping every day that he felt _off_ when he was stuck in his own reality. And being in his own reality meant no Gavin. Michael was lost without Gavin.

Part of him had always known that there’d be a time when he’d stop being able to jump. It had to be by a fluke that he could do it in the first place. Everything about it felt like a mistake, like his reality was half-formed and melted away at an intense feeling. He’d hit puberty, gone through years of raging emotions, and now he was done with it and able to control his emotions better. Every time he tried, he’d feel things starting to slip through his fingers, but they’d always solidify again within a few moments. It was fucking _frustrating_.

The frustration was what had allowed him to jump this time and it was why he didn’t respond to Gavin’s hug. Falling in love with him had felt like the most natural thing in the world—and this, this gradual loss of his shitty superpower, was the only thing that felt _off_ and _out of place_. Jumping to different realities had become so commonplace that he didn’t even consider it odd anymore. He was unstuck in reality and that was just fine. Nearly three years of it had done nothing but benefit him, giving him a place away from the frustrations at home and somebody to talk with, even if Gavin wasn’t real, by the dictionary definition of the word.

He was used to it to the point where he’d started to be able to control it. He’d begun being able to illicit those intense emotions for himself, enough to throw him into a different timeline. He didn’t have complete mastery over it, but it was enough to make him happy, enough to give him what he wanted. Enough that it let him control when he met up with Gavin and enough to give him the satisfaction of a friendship with him and enough to make him fall in love with him.

“I’m sorry,” Was all he could say, because for all Michael knew, this could be his last jump. He couldn’t, wouldn’t bring himself to say that, so instead he lied through his fucking teeth, “I’m sorry, Gav. I just got a little busy.”

There was nothing he wanted to do more than to kiss Gavin, because he was an idiot in love with a blonde boy who didn’t even exist in his reality. But he didn’t.

And that’s how Michael Jones left Gavin Free—without a goodbye and without even one last hug.

 

 

His life went on.

It went on slowly, but it went on. Time crawled by at first. Michael knew he was done jumping. This was his reality to stay in. It was where he belonged, even if he felt empty and incomplete in it. He should’ve stayed here in the first place, but didn’t. He’d jumped and he’d paid the price for it. He hadn’t even told Gavin goodbye. There wasn’t room for goodbyes and life would go on, as much as Michael didn’t want it to.

But it did. Crawling turned to walking when Michael moved out after entering a deep depression. He forced himself to keep going, so he did. He got his job as an electrician and moved out. He tried and tried to jump again, tried to force himself to _feel_ , but it never worked. He never got it just right and he was left feeling frustrated and angry to the point where he couldn’t handle it and he _still_ couldn’t jump.

The only thing left to do was put that anger into something. So, Michael filmed himself screaming at video games. It wasn’t an act—he really _was_ that angry. He was pissed at himself, pissed at the world, pissed at reality and what he’d done and above all, how he hadn’t even had the goddamn _decency_ to tell Gavin goodbye. The anger overloaded him, his previous feelings for Gavin still there, still just as intense, making his anger still worse and worse.

Then people started taking notice, though. People started watching him, and Michael started actually putting effort into his videos. He started taking the time to edit them, putting care into them, making them the funny internet videos people wanted to see. Life moved on and so did he. Slowly, slowly, Gavin started taking up a lesser part of his life. He still thought about the wandering boy he once knew, the troubled kid who he’d finally convinced to go home. He still wondered how he was doing, if he’d made friends with that Dan boy he’d been talking about, and above all, if Gavin had entertained the same feelings Michael had for him. But he didn’t think about him all day every day.

Thoughts of Gavin would pop up at random, seemingly out of nowhere, but they didn’t stick around for long. Michael learned to acknowledge them and move on. And that was what he did. He went on, even though he still loved Gavin, even if he still hated a part of himself for not saying goodbye.

He was starting his twenties when he got a job offer from a company in Austin. RoosterTeeth. He took it immediately and started January that year.

 

“We’ve got a new hire.”

That was the rumor going around lately. New hire this. New hire that. That was what everyone was talking about. Achievement Hunter was getting a new hire—Some British kid Geoff knew. He was still too new to the company to know about Geoff’s connections with idiot British kids. He’d been there for just a month and was just beginning to show his real personality. He was uncharacteristically shy, too afraid of losing his dream job to really let loose. He was starting to come out of his shell, little by little.

“Yeah? He’s coming today?” Honestly, Michael didn’t care much. They’d recently hired Ray, and a whole bunch of new people had been filtering into the other departments. Geoff had been talking about not just one, but two new hires. This one was supposed to be closer to Michael and Ray’s age, if Geoff and Jack were to be trusted. They seemed especially excited about it, too—Geoff had been grinning all day, enough that Michael had just slipped his headphones on and tuned everyone else out, anxious to get back to editing his videos.

“You bet. That’s all anyone’s talking about,” Ray told him. “He’s here. Geoff said so.”

“Tell me about it,” This was the only time Michael had actually seen the Achievement Hunter office empty. Geoff and Jack were showing the new hire around. Burnie and Joel were absolutely nowhere to be seen for once. Everyone except Michael and Ray were just gone. Whoever this guy was, apparently he was important.

“Oh—Michael, they’re coming in here now,” Ray shook his shoulder, trying to get him to look towards the doorway. “Michael, Jesus. At least say hi.”

“—This are our newest hires. Ray Narvaez and Michael Jones,” Geoff was saying, and Michael groaned, knowing he was obligated to look at the person.

He pushed his feet against the feet of his chair, spinning it around so that he was facing them. His eyes fell on Geoff, with his shitty beard and droopy eyes, his face alight with happiness, a much different expression from what Michael usually saw on him. Next to him was a man slightly shorter than him, his hair a sandy mess of hair, standing gangly, like he was almost too big for his own skin. He had tanned skin and—

“Michael, Ray, this is—”

Holy fuck.

Oh no. No, no, no no no. This couldn’t be happening.

He seemed to just _glow_ , like he belonged here, like he was always meant to be here. The world around him burst with color, everything getting clearer, Michael finally sliding into place in this reality. It was like something had suddenly clicked, like for twenty years, Michael’s life had been leading up to this moment, this moment where everything finally made sense, where he finally belonged somewhere. The man in front of him radiated the feeling, mirroring it back at Michael, making Michael whole again, fixing the incompleteness he’d felt all his life.

Those eyes—Michael could never forget those eyes. That nest of sandy blonde hair and those soft green eyes, always betraying emotion, darkening and brightening with thought, and that huge fucking nose of him. There were lots of things about him that Michael would never forget, even though it had been _years_.

And fuck, if he didn’t lock eyes with Michael and _fuck_ if he didn’t see the recognition there, and Michael had to check if he were imagining it when he saw the corner of those lips twitch upwards, seemingly carrying Michael’s name on them.

“—This is Gavin Free.”

Michael Jones finally belonged, and Gavin Free did, too. They’d found a home in the same reality together, years after they’d parted, the two of them stuck in the same universe with each other.

Life went on and at last, everything was right again.

 


End file.
